Three pages of the article are behind a paywall, but I recall something it said near the end. It was that when they crunched the numbers, of everything they looked at, longevity was the least correlated with heredity.
I could see all 4 pages. Try clearing NYT cookies.
It seems the opposite conclusion may be just a difference in reporting.
Most of the 2006 article deals just with "normally" long lived people (80-90 years vs. their shorter living relatives).
About 100+ year olds they wrote:
"A woman whose sister lived to be 100 has a 4 percent chance of living that long, Dr. Christensen says. That is better than the 1 percent chance for women in general, but still not very great because the absolute numbers, 1 out of 100 or 4 out of 100, are still so small. For men, the odds are much lower. A man whose sister lived to be 100 has just a 0.4 percent chance of living that long. In comparison, men in general have a 0.1 percent chance of reaching 100."
So even then, they found 4x higher relative chance for extreme longevity for people with extremely long lived siblings.
Life insurance premiums will never be the same again once this test is out there.
That means, for people who are more likely to live a long time, the recent-and-upcoming health care shifts are fantastic news. I remember reading about some 100+ers who have had their support vanish because they lived too long, and are now surviving wholly on donations. Some of them are quite active yet, but they're almost totally incapable of getting a job because of their age.
I can't help but think there is a flaw here. Isn't this a bias in favor of survivors? Without measuring the control group of people who have similar genes but did not survive, it's not possible to conclude that genes ~> longevity.
We should expect to see subtle associations with human longevity in genes associated with processes known to be important in long-term health - such as the inflammatory response, or indeed anything else associated with the operation of the immune system. But what can be done with this information? As things stand, probably little of consequence. All new knowledge in the biology of human aging will prove useful eventually, but in the near term it seems very unlikely that as much benefit can be derived from such exploration and analysis as from, say, effort put into developing repair technologies for the known forms of age-related damage.
We humans have a lot of genes, which means there is a very, very large number of potential interactions between gene variants - even within a subset of genes associated with a specific biological system. Discovery and understanding in the face of this complexity represents an enormous amount of work, which is one of the reasons that researchers who favor the metabolic manipulation approach to aging believe that we are a long way from any significant slowing of aging or extension of the healthy human life span.
Three pages of the article are behind a paywall, but I recall something it said near the end. It was that when they crunched the numbers, of everything they looked at, longevity was the least correlated with heredity.